2007. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
"From its distance, Hou’s camera shows a long and wide view, panning when needed but maintaining its original placement. Rather than motionless landscapes, his shots are like eyes gazing intently at a painting, seeing it in full yet scanning across the canvas to the forms within. The final scene of his most recent (and most mobile) film, Flight of the Red Balloon, literalizes this, his camera roving within Félix Vallotton's disquieting painting “The Ball” to contemplate a young boy scampering, a red ball looming, and ambiguous forms huddling. Overheard are school kids talking about the painting, their free-flowing conjectures synchronized with the camera’s movement, eyes and imaginations unbound despite the fact of the frame."
"Introduced enacting multiple voices for a live children’s puppet show and adorned with a wonderfully unkempt mass of horribly dyed-blonde hair, Binoche has never been like this onscreen; with Kieslowski and Malle she’s been porcelain and morose, with Haneke intense but mostly reactive. Here, Binoche is a flibbertigibbet, unpredictable, given to fits and starts of frustration towards the clutter of her life (especially regarding her unwanted tenant Marc, a friend of her distant boyfriend who’s been slack on paying rent) and intense adoration for her son. As in Caché, she’s surrounded by shelves of books, but this time they’re lovingly mismatched and tossed about, the belongings of a dedicated treasurer rather than the calcified status symbols of a thoughtless collector. She proudly wears sparkly, lumpy dresses over jeans and red track-suit jackets next to clashing leopard-print shirts, and Hou films her with admiration, never condescension."
Monday 29 February 2016
Tuesday 23 February 2016
Good Men, Good Women (Film)
1995. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Context:
Radical formal change: For the first time the majority of the shots use a mobile camera, including some elaborate plan-sequences, something which Hou had not done previously since most of his long takes had been (unusually for long-take directors) static. [See Udden chapter in Cinema Taiwan.]
Liang Jing is unresponsive to the excerpts of her own diary and cannot deal with a personal trauma in much the same way Taiwan as a whole cannot face up to the public traumas of its suppressed history,
"As with Three Times, some have misconstrued Good Men, Good Women as a simplistic excoriation of contemporary life (of malaise, disconnection, apoliticism) especially since its depiction of such is buffeted up against a more politically engaged moment in history. Yet Hou doesn’t retroactively honor activism; he’s interested in those people caught in the spokes of history rather than those who make grandiose gestures."
"The device of the faxes (one of the more forced allegorical gambits Hou’s ever offered), though reminiscent in some ways of the mysterious, accusatory videotapes arriving on Daniel Auteuil’s doorstep in Caché, doesn’t launch anything like Haneke’s wild goose chase investigation; the question here isn’t of motive. The silent thief who’s been harassing Liang remains anonymous right to the end, but Hou doesn’t seem to have much interest in teasing out his identity."
"For Liang to fully inhabit Chiang Bi-Yu and to understand Taiwan’s tumultuous legacy, need she come to terms with her own past? This isn’t a question Hou poses for his character, but for himself, it seems. There’s no such thing as reconciliation here, but there is doubtlessly a reckoning. In trying to find a way to adequately represent Taiwanese national identity, Hou discovers he might as well be asking the same of Taiwanese individual identity. That Liang Ching seems too fragile to withstand such scrutiny only makes her all the more appropriate as an avatar."
"As the camera roves around her dimly lit apartment (it could be early morning or mid afternoon, judging by the harsh light coming in through the drawn window shades), not following her exactly but catching her in crucial parts of the frame, we’re already treated to a slew of contradictory personality markers: Isabella Rossellini’s face peers out from a huge, framed Blue Velvet poster propped against the wall, certainly not foregrounded, but conspicuously there; the camera pans past Rossellini’s single, haunted eye and over to the television, which is playing a deceptively sunny scene from Ozu’s Late Spring, Setsuko Hara joyously riding her bicycle down a country street. Dichotomous images of actresses to be sure: which one represents Liang’s persona, if either? Hou would never be so gauche as to explicitly ask this, but as the film continues, and Liang’s identity is constantly split open and reframed (she’s a haunted actress in the present, in and out of period costume; a troubled, bar hostess and junkie in the recent past; a stoic medical student and political prisoner in the film within the film), we’re constantly searching for glimpses of individuality. Is she Rossellini’s bad-omen femme fatale or Hara’s good-natured, devoted daughter?" [http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/585/good_men_good_women]
Context:
Radical formal change: For the first time the majority of the shots use a mobile camera, including some elaborate plan-sequences, something which Hou had not done previously since most of his long takes had been (unusually for long-take directors) static. [See Udden chapter in Cinema Taiwan.]
Liang Jing is unresponsive to the excerpts of her own diary and cannot deal with a personal trauma in much the same way Taiwan as a whole cannot face up to the public traumas of its suppressed history,
"As with Three Times, some have misconstrued Good Men, Good Women as a simplistic excoriation of contemporary life (of malaise, disconnection, apoliticism) especially since its depiction of such is buffeted up against a more politically engaged moment in history. Yet Hou doesn’t retroactively honor activism; he’s interested in those people caught in the spokes of history rather than those who make grandiose gestures."
"The device of the faxes (one of the more forced allegorical gambits Hou’s ever offered), though reminiscent in some ways of the mysterious, accusatory videotapes arriving on Daniel Auteuil’s doorstep in Caché, doesn’t launch anything like Haneke’s wild goose chase investigation; the question here isn’t of motive. The silent thief who’s been harassing Liang remains anonymous right to the end, but Hou doesn’t seem to have much interest in teasing out his identity."
"For Liang to fully inhabit Chiang Bi-Yu and to understand Taiwan’s tumultuous legacy, need she come to terms with her own past? This isn’t a question Hou poses for his character, but for himself, it seems. There’s no such thing as reconciliation here, but there is doubtlessly a reckoning. In trying to find a way to adequately represent Taiwanese national identity, Hou discovers he might as well be asking the same of Taiwanese individual identity. That Liang Ching seems too fragile to withstand such scrutiny only makes her all the more appropriate as an avatar."
"As the camera roves around her dimly lit apartment (it could be early morning or mid afternoon, judging by the harsh light coming in through the drawn window shades), not following her exactly but catching her in crucial parts of the frame, we’re already treated to a slew of contradictory personality markers: Isabella Rossellini’s face peers out from a huge, framed Blue Velvet poster propped against the wall, certainly not foregrounded, but conspicuously there; the camera pans past Rossellini’s single, haunted eye and over to the television, which is playing a deceptively sunny scene from Ozu’s Late Spring, Setsuko Hara joyously riding her bicycle down a country street. Dichotomous images of actresses to be sure: which one represents Liang’s persona, if either? Hou would never be so gauche as to explicitly ask this, but as the film continues, and Liang’s identity is constantly split open and reframed (she’s a haunted actress in the present, in and out of period costume; a troubled, bar hostess and junkie in the recent past; a stoic medical student and political prisoner in the film within the film), we’re constantly searching for glimpses of individuality. Is she Rossellini’s bad-omen femme fatale or Hara’s good-natured, devoted daughter?" [http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/585/good_men_good_women]
Sunday 21 February 2016
The Puppetmaster (Film)
1993. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Context:
First of Hou's films to be shot in mainland China, as this had become a possibility politically, and pre-1945 settings could better be realised there. However there were difficulties organisation-wise and delays in shooting.
The Film:
Historical setting: The film ends (with the defeat of Japan and the end of the war and the colonial era) exactly where City of Sadness had started. It begins with Li Tianlu's birth at the beginning of the Japanese colonial era, and thus covers most of the years of Japanese rule.
Once again major events are elided or just alluded to in the background, and are viewed as incidental and temporary against the wider background of life and nature --- suggested by the numerous landscape shots.
Consists of three 'modes': Li Tianlu himself recounting his life, sometimes just heard on the soundtrack, but then leading to shots of him talking directly to camera; acted reconstructions of events from his life; the insertion of puppet shows, performed (in the acted narrative) by the young Li Tianlu, and operas.
Fiction-documentary shifts made smooth by cuts to the real Li in the same setting, and from the same axis, as the previous (fiction) shot, as well as by the sound bridges (of Li's narrating voice first off-screen then on-screen), which are crucial.
"It’s just that “greatness” is not quite the right word to ascribe to such a self-effacing movie. It’s long but not big, complex but not epic, morally committed but not given to proselytizing, and offers no grand spittle in the face of the cruelty of colonization."
"He’s on the wrong side of the law from the very beginning, with covert actions required to give him a family name (his parents’ choice of naming him matrilineally contravenes Japanese custom)" This motif (reflective of Taiwan's identity crisis?) also featured in Growing Up, and Dust in the Wind --- where Li Tien-lu himself spoke about it in the dream/flashback scene, hinting that this element was added in that film to suit Li's (autobiographical) performance.
" while Hou is careful never to let us forget that oppressive ideology, through the humiliations of official reprimands and ceremonies and the final insult of using his puppetry for propaganda, there’s also no countermovement in the form of angry rhetoric or even elaboration on a theme. Instead, Li carries on regardless. The important point is not the clash of civilizations but the measures to which one victimized civilization must go to accommodate another when it expands its borders and invades."
"If there is a valid point in stating that Hou has erased activism and resistance (and it’s a hard charge to dismiss completely), there is also the sense that the converse is true, that reducing everything to The Struggle tends to obliterate the very mundane existence that politics are supposed to secure."
Preservationist: a film aimed at "exploring the values of traditional culture which we have lost, particularly at this [materialist and technological] juncture of our existence," [Hou interview, quoted Suchenski 87.]
Reception:
First Taiwan film to compete in main competition at Cannes where it won the Jury Prize. This, according to Udden, was in large part due to the determined backing from Kiarostami on the jury.
Shigehiko Hasumi wrote that with this film Hou is able to 'reinvent cinema', and J. Hoberman in Village Voice described it as 'more like the rebirth of cinema itself' [Udden 116]
Context:
First of Hou's films to be shot in mainland China, as this had become a possibility politically, and pre-1945 settings could better be realised there. However there were difficulties organisation-wise and delays in shooting.
The Film:
Historical setting: The film ends (with the defeat of Japan and the end of the war and the colonial era) exactly where City of Sadness had started. It begins with Li Tianlu's birth at the beginning of the Japanese colonial era, and thus covers most of the years of Japanese rule.
Once again major events are elided or just alluded to in the background, and are viewed as incidental and temporary against the wider background of life and nature --- suggested by the numerous landscape shots.
Consists of three 'modes': Li Tianlu himself recounting his life, sometimes just heard on the soundtrack, but then leading to shots of him talking directly to camera; acted reconstructions of events from his life; the insertion of puppet shows, performed (in the acted narrative) by the young Li Tianlu, and operas.
Fiction-documentary shifts made smooth by cuts to the real Li in the same setting, and from the same axis, as the previous (fiction) shot, as well as by the sound bridges (of Li's narrating voice first off-screen then on-screen), which are crucial.
"It’s just that “greatness” is not quite the right word to ascribe to such a self-effacing movie. It’s long but not big, complex but not epic, morally committed but not given to proselytizing, and offers no grand spittle in the face of the cruelty of colonization."
"He’s on the wrong side of the law from the very beginning, with covert actions required to give him a family name (his parents’ choice of naming him matrilineally contravenes Japanese custom)" This motif (reflective of Taiwan's identity crisis?) also featured in Growing Up, and Dust in the Wind --- where Li Tien-lu himself spoke about it in the dream/flashback scene, hinting that this element was added in that film to suit Li's (autobiographical) performance.
" while Hou is careful never to let us forget that oppressive ideology, through the humiliations of official reprimands and ceremonies and the final insult of using his puppetry for propaganda, there’s also no countermovement in the form of angry rhetoric or even elaboration on a theme. Instead, Li carries on regardless. The important point is not the clash of civilizations but the measures to which one victimized civilization must go to accommodate another when it expands its borders and invades."
"If there is a valid point in stating that Hou has erased activism and resistance (and it’s a hard charge to dismiss completely), there is also the sense that the converse is true, that reducing everything to The Struggle tends to obliterate the very mundane existence that politics are supposed to secure."
Preservationist: a film aimed at "exploring the values of traditional culture which we have lost, particularly at this [materialist and technological] juncture of our existence," [Hou interview, quoted Suchenski 87.]
Reception:
First Taiwan film to compete in main competition at Cannes where it won the Jury Prize. This, according to Udden, was in large part due to the determined backing from Kiarostami on the jury.
Shigehiko Hasumi wrote that with this film Hou is able to 'reinvent cinema', and J. Hoberman in Village Voice described it as 'more like the rebirth of cinema itself' [Udden 116]
Friday 19 February 2016
Huang Chunming (Culture/History)
Key proponent of Nativist literature, and influential for the New Cinema. The Sandwich Man is adapted from three of his stories.
Quotes:
"Why do we need to have foreigners with their noses in the air tell us what is good? art must grow from the soil itself" [Udden. 51]
Quotes:
"Why do we need to have foreigners with their noses in the air tell us what is good? art must grow from the soil itself" [Udden. 51]
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